Frustrated by a lack of informed and honest review websites covering a wide range of electronic music, I write them myself.

Monday, July 27, 2015

Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Sleeps With Angels

Reprise Records: 1994

Sleeps With Angels is one of the best albums Neil Young and his Crazy Horse ever put out, yet hardly gets mentioned in discussion. True, some of their other records had more impact on rock’s landscape – no one's taking away classics like Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Rust Never Sleeps. This one though, note for note, chord for chord, guitar for piano, drum for flute, distortion for melody, Sleeps With Angels is a beautiful album. Not because it paints a pretty picture, oh no! These are some incredibly bleak songs, topics of death, decay, and depression all presented in as grungy a way as blues rock can go. There's something captivating about all this misery though, like scenes out of an art-house film without the pretentious waffle that comes with it.

For instance, the criminally overlooked song Driveby, which deals with drive-by shootings and the tragedy they so often create. Young doesn't preach, laying out one senseless scenario after the other, the music he and Crazy Horse provide marching at a sombrely pace as though they're funeral pall-bearers. Their harmonized chorus, simply the title of the track, is such a heart-breaker, you wonder if the band themselves suffered a drive-by death in the family.

And so much of Sleeps With Angels is like this. Prime Of Life details the insidious nature of tabloid magazines ruining the Royal Family, the titular cut touches on Kurt Cobain's suicide with distortion dragged through the ugliest gravel pit, Western Hero forlornly recalls past glories of an old cowboy, Trans Am forlornly recalls past glories of a Trans Am, Safeway Cart paints a portrait of ghetto decay, and the epic fourteen minute long Change Your Mind tries consoling with extreme depression, wary of the spectre of suicide ever lurking in the shadows. My God, it wasn't that many years prior Young gave the world the sentimental Harvest Moon, much less teaming up with The Horse on the free-wheeling Ragged Glory. Even the one 'cock rocker' on here, the hilarious Piece Of Crap, rants on about disposable consumerist junk. What made them turn so dour? '90s, man, f’n '90s.

I wonder if that’s why Sleeps With Angels doesn’t receive the same Boomer plaudits as Young’s older work. The songcraft is all here, Neil & Crazy as tight-knit yet wonderfully loose of a unit during their ‘90s resurgence, but older folks just don’t talk it up much. Are the topics too touchy for his traditional audience, a sense of all the things that generation had worked for run ragged and cast aside by Gen-X’s emergence upon adulthood? Figures Young found a common link between the two with his music, the grunge aesthetic he helped pioneer turned into musings on the state of the nation. Its topics the adults could relate to, but wrapped in a package appealing to the teens, and all the more brilliant for it. Sadly, that also lands Sleeps With Angels in a nowhere land between disparate music scenes, often neglected by both.